Corporations Benefiting from War (Nov.11th)

    At the beginning of today's class, we were given our end-of-term assignment for this semester. Blogging every single class honestly sometimes can be a burden, especially on weeks when we have several assignments for other classes, but now that I have pieces of writing I can look back on, the assignment seems not too problematic. Through all of this school year, and possibly even last year, we have been touching on a wide variety of topics, but they are all closely correlated with one another. So the "Iraq's Missing Billions" served as a culmination of our learning and I hope to organize my thoughts and have deeper realizations. 

    For the last 20 minutes of class, we continued on with watching the documentary. Before playing the documentary, Mr.Paterson introduced a significant person called Smedly Butler. He is famous for the quote "war is a racket". When I first heard this, it did not seem like it held any meaning but the teacher broke it down, and first explained that the word "racket" is a slang word for criminal enterprise run by the Mathia. His main point was the elites of corporations should be the first ones to participate in the war because it disappear overnight. Although Butler makes a very valid point, in reality, CEOs and politicians would not ever go to the frontlines of a war, because currently, not even their family is going. This depicts the disgraceful reality of poor people having to go to war, and corporations profiting from their labor. This was all very shocking because I had never thought anyone in the world would "enjoy" war.  Finding out that corporations are entertained by war because of the ample amounts of profit they make like from clothing, machinery, bombs, guns, and etc truly proves the limitless greed of corporations. Not only do they sell products, but during the war, everyone is listening for information on the radio, meaning more opportunities to appeal to citizens. Furthermore, Mr.Paterson mentioned politicians can also benefit from war because it makes them look tough, and depending on the political measures they implement, they can citizens' trust. After being bombarded by new information about the war, and hearing things like "corporations enjoy war" was really odd, astounding, and put me in a weird feeling. So, the more I think about Butler's words, it becomes more persuasive, but simultaneously I felt really hopeless.  

    After being lectured about Butler, and the concept he put forth into the world, we watched the documentary which talked about politicians becoming the high priest of countries. I am curious about when politicians started to be displaced and became the protagonists of our society, and why they are so successful. Speaking from an objective view, the power politicians hold is unusually substantial and too powerful for any human. In the documentary, I saw a seat card at the UN conference room saying "NIKE" and at first, I thought.it was some unusual conference where they bring in corporations. However, it was unquestionably a UN conference hall. Mr.Paterson saying something along the lines of "corporations are not elected by anyone, but they still representing people from across the world" really stuck with me and the more I thought about it, the more unacceptable it seemed. I had hoped and believed that the United Nations would be neutral and maintain to be the only truly global organization that addresses issues around the world. However, corporations (a group of people who have no limits in what they will do) being invited to discuss on poorer countries who do not have the power nor the capability to fight back at rich countries is simply wrong. The fact that some corporations have more money than an entire country was absolutely astoudning. And, when seeing the video of citizens protesting on the streets, throwing rocks toward the building, I felt angry as well. The contrast between rich white men and desperate poor people is so harsh. The divergence between the groups, and the "indoor people" deliberately making boundaries, not even puttin in the effort to fix the circumstance is obnoxious. Usually, when demonstrations are broadcasted on TV, violent scenes are shown, and along with that is narrators describing demonstrators as crazy, even though they are just fighting for basic human rights. For one thing, the people who should be depicted badly would be the nasty CEOs and politicians, not the erupted demonstrators. Regarding broadcasts, we also found out that accents used in TVs is manipulated as well. When I heard the commercial with the Scottish accent, I was actually persuaded, but when I listened closely, nothing they said made sense. Since our society is still permeated with all this fraud and filled with astoundingly clever tricks, I came to the conclusion that we have to be more critical to make sure we are not fooled by some good-sounding accent and actually scrutinize the facts and statistics. 

Notes:

Butler - until we get into a situation, where the first people who fight in a war

politicians: new high priest 

big corporations have had a seat in the united nations. 

"We are inside, they are outside."
inside: drinking expensive champagne, eating expensive food, talking about taking jobs away from the poor